MSX Dev 2020 blog 3: Hardware woes

The hardest part about ensuring that your software will work across all MSX variants is proper slot management.

When an MSX computer is booted up, before it loads into BASIC (or DOS) and scans floppy drives for executables, it searches the first two bytes of page 1 and 2 of all cartridge slots for the word "AB" (0x42, 0x43). In other words, your cartridge must contain 4342h at either $4000 or $8000.

When "AB" is found, that page of that cartridge is switched to being active. An unexpanded, base MSX1 looks like this pre-boot:

Page 0: Main ROM
Page 1: Main ROM
Page 2: [nothing]
Page 3: 16K RAM

Thus it makes sense for smaller games to simply boot from $8000 and stay in page 2. If a game contains "AB" at $4000, however, the configuration ends up looking like:

Page 0: Main ROM
Page 1: Slot w/ cartridge
Page 2: [nothing]
Page 3: 16K RAM

A 32kB ROM's upper 16kB is not necessarily enabled on page 2 - this I have found to be dependent on what system you're using and how you are launching the ROM. Thus, at minimum to ensure 100% compatibility, a 32kB ROM with its header at $4000 and existing in pages 1 and 2 needs the following:

4000h - "AB" + rom header that jumps to:
+ "FindMySlot" routine
+ enables active slot on page 2
+ jumps to page 2 (e.g. actual game init code is at 8000h)

From then on, perform loading from page 1 or whatever is needed, then enable Main-ROM on page 1 again, for the final configuration of:

Page 0: Main ROM [undisturbed]
Page 1: Main ROM [4000-8000h of cartridge data behind]
Page 2: 8000-bfff of cartridge data
Page 3: 16K RAM [undisturbed]

It's no wonder that floppy disks are a preferred method. They are infinitely cheaper than larger cartridge ROMs, inevitably hold more data, are far easier to reproduce and even fix, and the BIOS disk routines are not that difficult to use!

I encountered a similar problem when attempting to use the MoonBlaster sound driver. It requires certain pages to be set as Main ROM or RAM, but doesn't always check, and doesn't change things back when its done. It works under certain conditions, but usually on an MFR it just crashes or resets my system. Games like from Kai Magazine have this issue on my hardware. I got a headache trying to grok the source code for the MB replayer to fix it, so I just disassembled MuSICA for BASIC by hand and adapted it myself for pure assembly.

Ugh!